Since early 2010, when I posted Anecdotal Evidence: Serious Games As Persuasive Game-Life Integration, sharing my reflections
on Jesse Schell’s superb presentation Design Outside The Box at DICE
2010, I have been deliberately detached from the “Serious Games x Gamification”
discussion.I could have probably gone against the odds by
stating that I did not place that line between Serious Games & Gamification,
even though most purists did, for the following reasons:

As the Serious Games Market was starting to be
formed, I would have turned to the Chaos Theory that fully applies to major
step changes, when discontinuity prevails. In the beginning all you've got are
fractals, without any bonding. Therefore, at the early stages, inclusiveness could
make an incipient community gain critical mass and visibility - e.g. for the SG Market could imply welcoming
Simulations, Board Games and Collaborative Storytelling, as opposed to Serious
Games stricto sensus.

The more radical the change and the greater
the anticipated reach, the more chaotic is the process. The Chaos Theory
welcomes this sort of 'mess' as an inherent aspect of the transition. At that point, there were so many (and powerful) forces intervening in the SG market formation, that
"struggling for survival" behaviors often showed up, the same way they
do when restructuring corporate governance.

In addition, I am also a believer of Richard Tanner
Pascale’s (my late nineties mentor) approach to Polarity Thinking and what he
called “Contention Management”, which seeks to harness the conflicting energies
in an organization (in this case the SG community) to achieve positive change.

In the article, Tony Ventrice highlights the
fact that “To many, gamification remains a silly, vaguely defined concept; and
for the better part of five years, it has been exactly that. But times are
changing!”

He believes that 2015 will be remembered as
the year gamification turned the corner and shares four predictions of what
gamification of the workplace will look like in 2015 and beyond:

·The Real Potential Resides Inside The Enterprise

Tony is eliminating “customers” from the
equation. He states that corporate employment at all levels is experiencing a
crisis of engagement and the workplace provides compelling material for a
story. It’s a story of cooperation, competition, advancement, failure and
success. “Gamification is fundamentally about telling a story and provides a
means to remember, and people—employees—want to remember”, he adds.

·Full Potential Is Only Realized With A
Comprehensive Program

“Employees and companies want to feel part of
a larger story and successful businesses recognize the power in a unifying
sense of greater purpose”, he says. But building a comprehensive gamification,
enterprise-wide program, what he calls “the fully connected corporation”, is not
something he sees fully realized in 2015. He believes that vendors that make
the strongest moves in this direction will be the ones that make gamification a
legitimate industry in the future.

·Self-Serve Solutions Is the Predicted Business
Model

Recognizing that a
one-size-fits-all solution wouldn't work, Tony Ventrice also states that although
highly-targeted Gamification cannot be made to order, which would imply a
services heavy-business with higher costs, reduced margins, slow growth and
multiple points of failure. As a business model, inferior to self-service. He
predicts that to support a self-service model, gamification will become
“wizardized”, which translates to prepackaged best-practices, complex decisions
reduced to manageable choices, and integration eliminated or automated. To
grow as an industry, gamification must become increasingly "plug and
play."

·Greater Sophistication In Analytics – Self-Service
Extended To The Numbers

Ventrice anticipates that more sophisticated
analytics engines shall be offered coupled with vendors’ ability to predict and
prepackage appropriate reports by use-case.